No sooner am I through the door of Shirin Neshat’s New York studio than we are talking politics. The artist, whose work over two decades, which she describes as “subversively candid”, has precluded her from returning to her native Iran, is excited about the fragile diplomatic agreement reached in Geneva at the beginning of this month. “It may be my naive reading but I think it’s a very positive thing,” she says. “President Rouhani is a smart but cautious person — and the chief negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has become a hero embraced by the people.”

Next month, a retrospective of Neshat’s work will open at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington DC: it is the inaugural exhibition for the organisation’s new director, Melissa Chiu. And rather than present the artist’s oeuvre, a remarkable mix of hard-hitting politics and lyrical aesthetics, in chronological order, the show will tell a story of Iran’s relationship with the west. The timing seems perfect.

“Who would have thought that the Iran talks would be progressing in the way that they are?” laughs Chiu. “This idea of narrating history came to me because I think that Shirin’s work has often been conflated under the idea of talking about Islam and talking about women. For me, it has always been about Iran. If you look at her historical trajectory, the way she created it, there are specific moments in Iranian history that informed the creation of her work.

“As an Iranian in exile, she has always been very articulate about the idea of a condition of diaspora and, with that, the complexity of feeling connected to a culture, but living outside it,” adds Chiu. “It’s a very personal approach to history, through Shirin’s own eyes.”

The show will focus on three moments: the British- and CIA-backed coup that brought about the downfall of the democratically elected Mosaddek government in 1953; the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution; and, finally, the protests of 2009 that have become known as the Green Movement.

“Munis” (2008), the video that paved the way for the feature film Women Without Men (2009), which won Neshat a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival the same year, opens the show. Dipping in and out of magic realism, the work centres on one woman’s experience just before the 1953 coup which, as Neshat sees it, paved the way for the 1979 revolution. “You can see the rage that developed,” she says. “The embassy where the conspiracy was hatched in 1953 became what they called the House of Spies. But I think the American public are largely unaware of the US intervention in Iranian modern history.”

Like many of her compatriots Neshat, now 58, was sent abroad for her education in the 1970s. She studied art at Berkeley in California but did not practise as an artist until more than 10 years after graduating. Her first trip back to Iran, in the late 1980s, inspired “Women of Allah” (1993-96), a powerful set of images of veiled women with guns, their bodies inscribed by hand with Farsi poetry, through which she explored the experience of the women who had lived through the revolution and fought in the Iran-Iraq war.

The images brought her recognition as an international artist, and some notoriety. “Some people thought I was endorsing the Iranian government, the government thought I was criticising them and the critics thought I was just being provocative,” she says. “At that stage, I didn’t even have a career or a point of view. It was only later my work came to have a sharper knife.”

Neshat is happy to define herself as a Middle Eastern artist but she is not alone in distancing herself from the label “feminist”. “Many female artists in the region deal in their work with the experience of being a woman but I don’t think they are dealing with those issues as explicitly as they were in the 1990s,” says Omar Kholeif, a curator at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. “It has shifted into a more implicit critique.”

Reem Fadda, associate curator for Middle Eastern art at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, agrees: “The artists I see do not define themselves in any one box. In the Arab world and Iran there are multiple causes that people are struggling with: women’s issues are just one of many.”

If Neshat broke new ground in the 1990s in terms of drawing the world’s attention to her art, her strong focus on politics is part of a tradition. “Politics has always run through the work of artists from the Middle East, and its representation has changed with the great uprisings and conflicts,” says Kholeif. “The six-day war of 1967, for example, created a whole different language in visual culture.”

In the aftermath of the six-year effort involved in making Women Without Men, Neshat returned to monochrome portraiture: The Book of Kings (2012) about Iran’s Green Movement; Our House Is on Fire (2013), about the Arab Spring; and, last year, she accepted a commission to create Home of My Eyes, a series of 55 portraits of Azerbaijanis for the opening exhibition of the Yarat Contemporary Art Centre in Baku. Neshat asked her subjects what the word “home” meant to them and inscribed their answers on their bodies. Azerbaijan evoked the Iran of her childhood. “Baku felt old-fashioned, in a good way,” she says. “There was a poignancy to the project; I was half an hour’s flight from Iran.”

Some thought I was endorsing the government. The government thought I was criticising them

Three years ago, Neshat told an audience at Oxford university: “I am a restless, anxious, nervous person: I thrive on struggle. I need to feel I am growing.” So portraiture will take a back seat while she embarks on a second feature film, due for release next year, this time about the famous Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum. “She’s the most significant artist of the 20th century in the Middle East, loved by Egyptians, Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, says Neshat.” It will tell the story of an Iranian film-maker trying to find a way to make a film about a famous Egyptian singer. Neshat is not just directing — she has just completed her first script.

Another project, slated to take place in 2017, will take Neshat farther into uncharted waters. This time, she will be directing and designing the sets for an opera. The details are still secret but preparations involve backstage visits to the Metropolitan Opera and weekly coaching from a dramaturge. “It’s thrilling,” she says. “I’m a complete student.”

Neshat is not the only Iranian artist enjoying the limelight this year in the US. Pioneering Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, working in glass and now 91, has a show at the Guggenheim, while Parviz Tanavoli, “father of modern Iranian sculpture”, has his first full US retrospective at the Davis Museum in Massachusetts.

“It’s definitely the spring of Iranian art in the US,” says Kholeif, who commissioned this year’s Middle East-focused symposium at the Armory show in March. “We have a lot of work to do now to make sure the conversation continues.”

Interviews

INTERVIEW: Shirin Neshat – A Conversation (2014)

AMERICAN SUBURB X

February 15, 2014

Soliloquy Series, 1999

Shirin Neshat. A conversation.

By Raphael Shammaa for ASX

January 27, 2014

Raphael: Shirin, your upbringing in pre-revolutionary Iran straddled both the religious and the secular. You attended Catholic schools, your grandmother was a practicing Muslim but your father’s thinking was progressive. Did you study the Koran at home or in school in any formal manner?

Shirin: Well just to clarify, it’s not just my grandmother; my whole family were Muslims. I grew up in a strictly Muslim family and even my mother and father were Muslim. It’s just they were not as strict about practicing it, and in Iran in my time, and I’m sure today, yes we studied the Koran at school. We don’t speak Arabic, and the Koran is in Arabic language, but we prayed and we went to the mosque and we studied the Koran in school.

Raphael: Was that part of the curriculum in Catholic school?

Shirin: No, I went to Catholic school for only two years. I was mainly in public school in my city. Of course in Catholic school they wouldn’t be teaching the Koran. That was a boarding school. I went for a short time in the city of Tehran, but the rest of my education was in the city where I was born, which was a very religious city. I think it’s the third most religious city in Iran.

Raphael: Is it really?

Shirin: Yes, it is very very religious, and there we studied Arabic and also the Koran, from what I remember, yes. We were all practicing Muslims, so it wasn’t just my grandma or anything.

Raphael: Well thank you for this clarification. And knowing what was going on in your own country while you were in The States, how was it for you to witness Tianamen Square, the Velvet Revolution, the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania and the fall of the Berlin Wall – each of them the outcome of people rising against oppression and all of them taking place within the same twelve months in 1989, barely ten years after 1979, which was the year of the Iranian revolution?

Shirin: Well I grew up during the Shah period, and we lived under a heavy sense of censorship and there was a lot of social control and we had the Savak, which was the secret police of the Shah. It was as liberal as it may sound compared to this government, current government. It was really a hush-hush situation. There were a lot of student activists that were imprisoned. It was sort of forbidden to talk about Khomeini – because there were so many of them killed. Even at a young age I knew something was boiling up, meaning the frustration of the people who were religious and the frustration of students against the Shah’s tyranny, and then eventually what came out was the Islamic Revolution.

For me now, it is my understanding that nothing happens overnight. Everything sort of builds up over the years and it was no surprise that we had the Islamic Revolution. The groundwork took place a long time before that and I am one person who knew that. So my response to Tianamen Square and the razing of the wall in East and West Berlin was very much the same thing. It was the frustration of the people that eventually crystallized in a very strong reaction, and it made perfect sense, and for others who haven’t lived in countries such as that, or who have democracy, etcetera, I tend to think they believe it comes out of the blue, but in fact it takes 20 – 30 years, or more sometimes, to build up that kind of rage and determination to bring about a revolution.

Rapture Series, 1999

Raphael: Yes, it’s a confluence of factors.

Shirin: Exactly.

Raphael: In 1990, after a 12-year absence, you finally go back to Iran. The militancy of Irani women and their changed outer appearance, you say, were a shock to you. Your work, The Unveiling and Women of Allah, are products of this shock. What was the process that unleashed your energy and activated your art?

Shirin: It was the very simple reaction of a person who had been away since the start of the Islamic Revolution and was inundated with a sense of nostalgia and a longing to reconnect; and when, of course just like any other Iranian, I went back, I really did find that the place had changed like day and night in terms of what I had remembered was there before, even the way people looked, the way that people dressed, the way the streets were bombarded with propaganda against the US. It was totally unbelievable that this was the same country.

Raphael: The prevailing tone had changed.

Shirin: Exactly, and for me it became an obsession to understand, from a strictly artistic perspective, some of the issues that were really relevant to the understanding of this transformation. I decided to really focus on a very key conceptual ideological issue of the Islamic Revolution, which was the concept of martyrdom. Martyrdom – meaning that people who were very committed to and had a strong conviction to their religion would be willing to die and kill in the name of devotion and faith in God; and to me that was really a kind of loaded concept that was almost institutionalized by the government. But even more interesting, I saw that even women in the Islamic Revolution were seen in that new way, I mean there were a number of publications and images that showed religious Iranian woman wearing the veil and yet holding weapons, and I found that amazing – a kind of paradox.

So I just kind of took that and ran with it in terms of not only framing the question of martyrdom, which is this obsession with death, and life after death, and the idea that young people should die and that their families should be congratulated for their deaths because they’re now in heaven but, more so, that women were placed within that context even though women are generally about giving life and birth and not about dispensing violence and death. So I just found that as an artistic and philosophical point of view a kind of fascinating phenomenon, and decided to develop Women of Allah, which pretty much explores these conflicting ideas.

Raphael: Is it a matter of concern to you that it’s easy to a casual audience outside of the Middle East to confuse Persian script with Arab calligraphy and to erroneously assume that the text overlaying your art in The Unveiling and Women of Allah is excerpted from the Koran instead of what it really is: contemporary, even feminist Irani poetry, a far cry from Koran texts?

Shirin: It’s a good point. There are two issues that frustrate me often. People in the West often cannot understand the difference between people who are Arab and Iranian. Iranians are not Arabs and we do not speak Arabic and we don’t write in Arabic, but we have the same alphabet, and you know also that Western audiences often rush to think that everything that we write is excerpted from the Koran, which I would never do. It would be so sacrilegious, and my texts are all Iranian text, Farsi text, and they’re all poetry. And another frustrating thing is that when I speak about my work, about my subject, people don’t understand that I’m really talking about Iran. I’m not talking about the entire Muslim world, because that relationship to Islam is specific to each country’s political history and about their specific relationship to Islam, in terms of whether it is an authentic religion, whether it was brought in by force, whether it was a secular religion or a non secular religion, so unfortunately there is in the West that rush to generalizing when representing me as someone who makes work about Muslim women. I don’t do that. I’m very specifically talking about Iran.

Raphael: You’re really focused on the product and the outcome of the Iranian Revolution and the effect it has had on women in the population there. So I wanted to talk a little bit about your short piece Turbulent. It’s a haunting video installation, and it features a man singing a Persian poem by Rumi and simultaneously, on a separate screen in another part of the same room, a veiled woman intones a primeval, wordless lament. The man sings to an audience, confident in his own talent and their appreciation of his art, and the woman to an empty room. But then the man seems to gradually become aware of the female voice reaching him across the chasm and he becomes transfixed by it. At this point the episode seems to transform itself into a call-and-response duet across space. Is this about hope? Is it an ode to receptive men willing to listen past prejudice and ignorance, or is it about women’s innate power to communicate something deeper and more powerful even than culture itself?

Shirin: Yes, I think it’s more about the second explanation. That piece along with two other videos is based about the issue of gender in Iranian society, referring to the fact that women often find themselves against the wall. This particular piece, Turbulent, is about women being forbidden to sing publicly or produce recordings. I was fascinated by how in general, women in Iran, the more against the wall they feel, the more defiant and innovative they become. I believe that if you look at Iranian society today you’ll find women to be remarkably rebellious. So that piece is more about looking at it through the rules governing music. The man sings a stylized, predictable, conceptual piece and is applauded by his all-male audience. And what about the woman? She’s forbidden to sing and therefore becomes creative and makes music outside sanctioned music or language and their rules. While she is rebellious, the man continues along conformist lines, a metaphor of Iranian society.

Raphael: Does the metaphor also stand for art in such societies?

Shirin: Yes, in fact the kind of expression you expect from women is very, very different from that of men’s. Therefore, whatever is created or is expressed by women is radically different from whatever is created or is expressed by males. And being a woman I’m very fascinated by Irani women.

Raphael: Of course. And in Rapture, women in traditional black Chadors busy themselves on a beach putting a small boat to sea, some, but not all, departing onto the open waters toward unspecified shores. Men in western clothes on the other hand, survey the scene from elevated rampart walls – hemmed in, moving about their enclosure with nowhere to go but the short distance to the next fortified wall. This work seems to present an inverse perspective on gender realities in Irani society from what we know. Is this a misreading of your work or is it a psychological portrait?

Shirin: Rapture is an allegorical piece just like Turbulent. It addresses important sociocultural issues in an allegorical way. If Turbulent is about gender in relation to music, Rapture is about gender in relation to nature and culture. And for me it is truly curious that religious women in Iran are never pictured as having any connection to nature – mostly represented as they are in urban environments; and I found it interesting to represent a hundred of them in Nature while representing men in a traditionally masculine space. I feel there is a common thread between Rapture and Turbulent where, in the end, women show enough courage to migrate from the desert towards the sea and, eventually, just leaving. As in Turbulent, they contradict standard expectations by resorting to courage and rebelliousness.

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Passage Series, 2001

Raphael: Yes, in your pieces, men seem to be hemmed in by tradition, and women to be responding to their own nature.

Shirin: Yes, exactly. Your reading is correct. Both pieces are similar in their conceptual approach.

Raphael: You say that if we really want to know a society we ought to look at how its culture deals with women and how women are faring within that society, and you seem to position women’s status as the proverbial “canary in the coal mine”, a strong indicator of how balanced a particular society is.

Shirin: In a lot of Islamic societies women embody the rules of government, of society or religion, so their private lives are much more impacted by them than men’s, but I think this is changing and if you look at Iran today and even at my own recent work you’ll find women no longer abiding by government rules quite as much. They’re very educated and independent, they’re very vocal, and powerful participants in protests. In the streets of Tehran some women even dress in outrageous ways. They just refuse to mirror government dictates. At the very least they’re subversive.

Raphael: The brand new Tunisian Constitution enshrines women as equal rather than complementary to men. Do you think that will spread through the Muslim world any time soon, or at least have some impact?

Shirin: I’m very optimistic about President Rouhani and I have the feeling we’ll see some very good things happen to women as well.

Raphael: Incidentally, I want to ask you how different your career would be today without the advent of the Iranian Revolution and the dramatic rise of the ayatollahs?

Shirin: That’s a good question. Maybe I wouldn’t be an artist. I think it’s true that much of my work has been defined by the Islamic Revolution, by my reaction to it, and that my life has been defined by it. I’ve been separated from my family and live in exile, so emotionally and, I suppose intellectually, my work is my response to the Revolution and how it has defined a whole generation of people in and from Iran.

It’s fascinating how this revolution defines so many peoples’ lives, whether they choose to leave or stay and what kind of political decision they opt for. I haven’t seen my family in so long and it’s had a direct influence on my thinking, and yes, if all of this wasn’t an issue I certainly don’t think I would have been an artist, just talking about the weather or…

Raphael: Or not the same artist, perhaps.

Shirin: Yes. You know I stopped making art for ten years.

Raphael: Yes.

Shirin: Yeah, not the same artist. Maybe it’s a good thing [the Revolution] – or I would have quit altogether.

Raphael: And yet, although there is no fatwa against you, you hesitate to go back to Iran for reasons of personal security. Is Iran the only country you feel that way about?

Shirin: I think so. I think it is the only country.

Raphael: You directed a short for the 2013 Viennale with Natalie Portman and cinematographer Darius Khondji – both world class artists and you are proceeding with research on a film about Umm Kulthum, the legendary Egyptian female singer (in yet another Islamic country) with more or less the same issues. Does working on these projects, because they are not related to Iran, feel different than working on say, Turbulent, or Women Without Men – your award-winning feature?

Shirin: I think it’s very similar because in Women Without Men the main idea is the relationship between art and politics, the lives of certain women as Iran was battling a coup… I’m not sure if you’ve seen the movie…

Raphael: Yes, I have…

Shirin: With Umm Kulthum I feel that by making this film we’ll be navigating and taking the audience on that same journey. Once we’re with Umm Kulthum and her music, with art and mysticism, brought to the level of primal responses, we find ourselves elevated beyond time, politics or even history. We’ll use the music, the camera and everything else we have to take the audience to that state of ecstasy. Because she happened to live in Egypt at such a pivotal time in politics, we’ll take the audience through the age of colonialism, of social revolution, of the war with Israel and through defeat and economic disaster. We’ll show her at the center of all that as well as an artist. For me, this is potentially a similar concept – it’s about the underlying connections between individuals, the community, art and politics.

Raphael: Does serendipity play any role in your work despite all the planning?

Shirin: You know something, I believe in magic. For example, we have this opening at the Rauschenberg Foundation this week and it never occurred to me that the theme of the exhibit is about loss in the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution, and that this month is the anniversary and that there’s violence there again.

Also, I’m just back from Davos, from the World Economic Forum, where I was given a prize and had to give a little speech. This year is also the first in ten years that the Iranian president agreed to participate. That was serendipity – an Iranian artist and the Iranian president.

And after working on it for years, Women Without Men came out exactly in the same summer of 2009 when we had the uprising in Iran. People thought we planned it like that, because there were all these shots of protest in the streets of Tehran in 1953, so yeah, I believe in magic.

Raphael: How would you like that particular body of work to be seen over time other than playing against its specific backdrop and time in history?

Shirin: Which body of work?

Raphael: The one that has to do with women within the Irani revolution.

Shirin: Well I’ve come to the conclusion that, in terms of my photographs, I’ve done two big bodies of photographs. Both of them have been human portraits. One of them has been Women of Allah, which basically captured a pivotal moment in Iranian history, which was the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The next body of work in photography, again a human portrait, captured during the Spring and Iranian Green movements another pivotal moment in Iranian contemporary history. For me, my photographs, the big two, are the only two groups of photographic work that I’ve done, each one of them representing a particular moment in Iranian history but neither reflecting what’s going on today. The Book of Kings, finished in 2011, represents a lot more of Iran today, but Woman of Allah should be looked at as something of the past and no longer of the present.

Raphael: As an engaged artist do you feel that contemporary art sometimes suffers from lack of content?

Shirin: Yes absolutely, I have two thoughts on that. I don’t insist on contemporary artists being politically active but they ought to be politically conscious. And if I could be that blunt, I think the art market has been the biggest factor in determining art movements for the past decade or so; and the money involved has seduced galleries, collectors and artists to becoming super rich and very, very distanced from sociopolitical issues; art has basically become a commodity and about entertainment.

Being Iranian came as a mixed blessing of course, because Iranian artists paid a great price, having to live in exile and being censored. You really have to suffer for what you do, but I have to say that I have not become just pure commodity and my work has been effective and has been heard by non-art people from my community and that gives me a lot of pride. So I do criticize the art world and the artist today and think that this was not the case before.

That’s why I’m so proud to be apart of the Family of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation because as a Western artist he definitely has a legacy in being politically conscious and an advocate for helping with different causes from education, to AIDS, to government, to asking for democracy. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t make highly aesthetic works but it still means that you should be engaged. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be painting landscapes and things that aren’t completely outside of political reality but I think it’s important to be engaged.

Raphael: You were not born into the US culture, obviously and the country in which you grew up is no longer there. How does that reality play out for you?

Shirin: Yeah. This is the story of the new generation of artists that we are truly nomads. In my case I don’t even remember living in a place in which I look like everyone else and speak the same language. I’ve always been an outcast. It’s just a way of life. I am a storyteller and I find my way. I go to Mexico, Egypt, Morocco and Turkey and I make work that makes one believe that I’m in Iran, and this reality of never being in a place that’s your place of origin, has been a way of life.

Raphael: Is there are a part of you that wishes for a place that you actually belong and feel totally at home in?

Shirin: No, to be very honest. I’ve lived longer in this country now than I have anywhere else. My independence and way of life is non-Iranian in many ways. Inasmuch as I’m emotionally Iranian and I’m surrounded by a community that’s Iranian I don’t think any of us have the ability to go back to that idea of purity of just remaining in one place. I go to Egypt now and I feel so at home. I go to Europe and I don’t feel quite as home but I can adjust to it. I can’t go someplace where they tell me how to be and how to live, that there’s just one way of being. I just don’t know. I’d love to visit Iran but I just don’t know if I could ever go there to live permanently.

Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide, including the Detroit Institute of Arts; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She is the recipient of various awards, such as the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), and the Crystal Award at the World Economic Forum, Davos (2014). In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice International Film Festival. Declared Artist of the Decade in 2010 by The Huffington Post, Neshat is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Shirin Neshat

by Arthur C. Danto

In 1999, in consequence of the wide success of her video installation Rapture, Shirin Neshat achieved immediate celebrity as a major contemporary artist. This standing was reinforced by Fervor, one of the highlights of the Whitney Biennial 2000. These two works, together with the slightly earlier Turbulent, compose a trilogy on human identity, inflected by differences in gender and culture, which situates the work at the heart of art world preoccupations today. A fourth film, Soliloquy , portrays a woman torn between two forms of life, modern and traditional, Western and Middle Eastern, to neither of which she can fully surrender. All four films enact these conflicts and tensions in the symbolic terms of very high art, and in ways that, beyond their contemporary topicality, touch our essential humanity.

The urgency with which these issues are presented in her films implies that they are felt with a commensurate urgency by the artist herself, so that her success is an opportunity to pursue a mission which involves her art together with her life, and entails real decisions as to how and where to live and work. This interview was conducted in Neshat’s loft deep in New York’s Chinatown, above the shouts of shopkeepers and customers. We spoke in her studio, where the films are worked out. There is a pair of monitors on a table beneath some bookshelves. It is a very orderly atmosphere, though the answering machine was kept busy throughout our conversation. The artist was dressed in a black outfit, an affinity with the garments the women in her films wear, and she speaks fluidly, with a soft accent. Shirin Neshat is an unassuming person, entirely without airs, but she shares a certain fierce determination with the women she portrays.

Arthur C. Danto The last three years have been extremely productive for you, you’ve done four films. What were you doing before the films?

Shirin Neshat I graduated from UC-Berkeley in 1983 and moved soon after to New York City where I quickly came to the conclusion that art making wasn’t going to be my profession. I felt what I was making was not substantial enough—and I was intimidated by the New York art scene. So I worked to earn money and took courses in various subjects. Soon after I met my future husband, who ran the Storefront for Art and Architecture, an alternative space in Manhattan. I dedicated the next ten years intensely to working with him at the Storefront, and that became my true education. Storefront functioned like a cultural laboratory, the program was quite cross-disciplinary; I was constantly working with artists, architects, cultural critics, writers and philosophers. This exposure eventually led me to think about myself as an artist and I wanted to make artwork again. During those ten years I made practically no art and what I did make I was quite dissatisfied with and eventually destroyed. So it was only in 1993 that I began to seriously make artwork again.

AD And those were photographs?

SN Yes, I thought photography was the most appropriate medium for my subject as it had the realism that I needed. In the 1990s I finally began going back to Iran. I had been away for over ten years—since the Islamic Revolution. As I traveled back and forth a lot of things started to go through my mind, which eventually led me to develop the work that I have. My focus from the beginning was the subject of women in relation to the Iranian society and the revolution, so I produced a series of photographic images that explored that topic.

AD I was talking just last week with Susan Sontag, who said that, in her view, the Iranian film movement is the most remarkable in contemporary cinema. That’s quite an extraordinary claim. How do you account for that?

SN I agree with her. I am very inspired by the new trend in Iranian cinema. In my opinion, it has been one positive aspect of the revolution, as it has in a way purified Iranian culture artistically by eliminating Western influences that had deeply infiltrated our culture. Before the revolution, Iranian film followed similar standards as in any commercial Western film, much of it was filled with superficiality, violence and sex. After the revolution, the government imposed severe codes; filmmakers had to reformulate their ideas, and as a result a new form of cinema was born that thrived in the midst of all the governmental censorship. These films have been successful for their humanistic, simple and universal approach. They reveal so much about Iranian culture without being overly critical. The pioneer of this generation of filmmaking, Abbas Kiarostami, is showing his most recent film, The Wind Will Carry Us, in New York starting in July.

AD Let me ask about your first films. When you began to show them here were they more or less conventional, linear films with a single screen . . . or did you begin with the double-screen format right away?

SNTurbulent was my first cinematic film. Prior to that, I had made a few videos which I consider very different; they were video installations, very sculptural, with no specific narrative, beginning or end.

AD That was video as it was understood at that time: something projected on a wall, a nonnarrative, free play of images. Did you have sound?

SN Yes, sound was always an important part of my work.

AD And was it always music?

SN Well, I had made some very simple rhythmic sounds with my own voice. For example, one of the pieces I made in Istanbul was of a woman—me, actually—running in four distinct types of spaces and projected on four screens, simultaneously. And in a piece called The Shadow Under the Web, I made a sound with my own voice, something between breathing and singing, repeated in different time signatures. I improvised it as we were recording. In Anchorage, which was a single projection, there was a combination of chanting and a very simple song, and again, I improvised.

AD You composed those songs spontaneously?

SN Yes, on the spot at the recording studio.

AD There must have been a moment when the ideas that began to be expressed in Turbulent came to consciousness. You took a shift, a change in direction; did you feel yourself on the threshold of something quite different? I remember seeing some photographs of you with what seemed an antique sort of rifle. Where do these fit in?

SN The first group of photographic work I produced in 1993 certainly reflected the point of view of an Iranian living abroad, looking back in time and trying to analyze and comprehend the changes that had taken place in Iran since the revolution. It was the approach of an artist who had been away for a long time, and it was an important turning point for me artistically and personally, as it became more than art making but a type of journey back to my native country. I was deeply invested in understanding the ideological and philosophical ideas behind contemporary Islam, most of all the origin of the revolution and how it had transformed my country. I knew the subject was very complex and broad so I minimized my focus to something tangible and specific. I chose to concentrate on the meanings behind “martyrdom,” a concept which became the heart of the Islamic government’s mission at the time, particularly during the Iran/Iraq War. It promoted faith, self-sacrifice, rejection of the material world, and ultimately, life after death. Mostly, I was interested in how their ideas of spirituality, politics and violence were and still are so interconnected and inseparable from one another. But after a few years, I felt that I had exhausted the subject and needed to move on. I no longer wanted to make work that dealt so directly with issues of politics. I wanted to make work that was more lyrical, philosophical and poetic.

AD It did come across as didactic, and, in a way, rhetorical.

SN There were a lot of problems there with the issue of translation, literally in terms of the writing I was inscribing onto the photos and in cultural misreading. I must admit, when I made this group of work, I did not have an audience in mind. I had never exhibited before and had no plans for it. Eventually, when I did have an audience, I felt conflicted as to how I might go about translating ideas that were so entirely based on non-Western rationality without compromising their authenticity and meaning. Looking back at this work, I do see the problems but it was an honest attempt to reconnect and raise important issues in regard to my culture. I reduced my references in order to get a handle on the subject of martyrdom, but perhaps a lot got lost in between. I felt strongly about moving on, making work that, while ethnically specific, could allow wider interpretation.

AD Something that touches on what one might call universal human nature.

SN Exactly.

AD That’s the feeling I have with those works.

SN By this time, you have to understand, my relationship to the subject, my understanding and feelings about the revolution had all changed. When I first arrived in Iran, I was really taken by everything and desperately wanted to belong to the Iranian community again. It was almost a romantic return to Iran. Turbulent was the first work that no longer had the perspective of an artist distanced from her culture; it dealt with an issue that belonged to the present and revealed a new sense of intimacy and familiarity between myself and the subject. By this time, I had a pretty good understanding of the way in which Iranian society functioned. I had been traveling to Iran frequently and was working with an almost entirely Iranian crew.

Shirin Neshat, Rapture, 1999, video still.

AD When you began to work on Turbulent, were you thinking of it as part of a trilogy—which is what, evidently, the three films constitute—or were you thinking of it as a single statement, which, as it turned out, led to two other films?

SN I didn’t think of it as a trilogy at first. It is just that one subject—one project led to the other. The topic of masculine and feminine in relation to the social structure of Iran started with Turbulent. As I finished it, I immediately moved on to making Rapture, which although very different, raised similar issues. Finally Fervor was made, which in my opinion closed the chapter on this series. What inspired me to make Turbulent was a strange experience I had on the streets of Istanbul, seeing a young, blind woman singing to make a little money; her music was extraordinary and the public gathered uncontrollably around her. I fell in love with her music, bought a cassette. Later I had her songs translated and became obsessed with how much her blindness—not having a visible audience—affected her music.

AD This is one of the things that struck me about Turbulent. The male singer is on one screen, and he’s singing with a great deal of passion, but with his back to the audience. The camera is backstage, so we see him singing, and we see his audience behind him. The female singer is on another screen and she’s facing an empty auditorium. You only see her from the back; she’s quite mysterious. As a matter of fact, she looks like a death figure from the Inquisition. All through the man’s singing, you just see her from the back. And you don’t know what this is all about. The man’s audience is extremely responsive; they applaud. As I remember it, he turns around, bows to the audience and then faces back, and the woman who is on the other screen begins to sing. Her singing is very different from his; it seems electronic. It’s modified, it’s not ordinary singing. And then bit by bit her face begins to emerge and you see her sing. The camera pans back and forth over the empty auditorium. And on the other screen, the man is staring at her. So he at least is in some way a member of her audience, although you’re not quite clear how that happened. So that was the juxtaposition.

SNTurbulent is similar to Rapture in that both films are based on the idea of opposites, visually and conceptually. The male singer represents the society’s ideal man in that he sticks to the rules in his way of dressing and in his performance of a passionate love song written by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi. Opposite to him, the female singer is quite rebellious. She is not supposed to be in the theater, and the music she performs breaks all the rules of traditional Islamic music. Her music is free-form, improvised, not tied to language, and unpredictable, almost primal.

AD When you say she’s not supposed to . . .

SN An important aspect of Turbulent is that women in Iran are prohibited from singing in public, and there are no recordings by female musicians. The piece took off in various directions and brought about other important questions about the male and female contrast in relation to the social structure. The ultimate question was how each would go about reaching a level of mystical expression inherent in the Sufi music.

AD But her song is not a traditional song.

SN No. It is Sussan Deihim’s music; she’s a gifted, contemporary Iranian singer living in New York. Although her music is based on traditional Islamic melodies, it is quite radical, too, in that it does not quite resemble any particular music.

AD It was her voice in Turbulence, and her person you were photographing?

SN Yes. We spent a lot of time together discussing the choice of music and her presence in the film and how absolutely critical they were to the meanings of the work.

AD Very percussive.

SN By the end, we wanted the male singer to be stunned, in a state of disbelief, and the female singer to be released—freed. She, of course, had no trouble doing that.

AD Well, she had no trouble with the music. But that effect, of being free, and the man being stunned—do you think that registers visually in the film?

SN I think it did. We discussed at great length with Shoja, the male singer, how important his expressions were, his compassionate but almost envious gaze.

AD Who wishes in a way that he could be freer, as she is.

SN Exactly. And that sexual hierarchy is inevitably outside of his control. Perhaps he himself is a type of prisoner.

AD Very much like the men in Rapture.

SNRapture followed the same framework. Once again, the women are the unpredictable force, they are the ones who break free. The men, from the beginning to the end, stay within the confinement of the fortress. This all ties back to what I believe is a type of feminism that comes from such a culture; on a daily basis the resistance you sense from the women is far higher than that of the men. Why? Because the women are the ones who are under extreme pressure; they are repressed and therefore they are more likely to resist and ultimately to break free.

AD Formally speaking, it doesn’t sound entirely different from feminist discourse in the West. The difference as you represent it in the films is that the men seem condemned to a life of futility, and are unable to break free. Whereas here, the male life is conceived of as the significant life, overcoming obstacles, having careers, etcetera. And in a certain way, an American woman’s freedom is modeled on the idea of what it is to be a free male. Whereas what you convey is women moving into a very unstructured space, for which males are no longer the models. If anything, if the male is to genuinely be free, he’d almost have to model himself on the female. And of course you can’t be terribly explicit about that because nobody knows how that’s going to work out. One of the things I love about Rapture is the uncertainty of it. With these women setting off on that boat, you found, I thought, a marvelous, mythic image.

SN Thank you. But I disagree with you that our idea of feminism is similar to that of the West. From my understanding, Western feminism is about reaching a certain level of equality between men and women . . .

AD Yes, that’s just what I do mean.

SN But I don’t believe we strive for the same thing. Iranian women, for example, feel that men and women have their own distinct roles and places, they are not competitive.

AD And that will continue to be true?

SN I think so. I believe their struggle is to reach an equilibrium necessary in a just and healthy society. They want the domestic responsibility—which actually gives them a lot of power. Where they suffer is in their inability to maintain their rights as women, for example in the areas of divorce, child custody, voting, etcetera.

AD I don’t want to get too deeply involved in the differences and similarities. I quite agree with you that equality and liberty are 18th-century ideas very central to American consciousness—but feminist theorists have said that the liberation of women also means the liberation of men. It’s in that sense that I meant there’s a similarity, there’s a mutual liberation in that the future and destiny of male and female is quite open.

SN It would be a generalization to speak about Islam as a whole, but I know in Iran women are quite powerful, unlike their clichéd image. What I try to convey through my work is that power, which is quite candid. In Rapture, the heart of the story is the women’s journey from the desert to the sea; eventually a few leave on a small boat. This journey, the attempt to break free, for me symbolizes bravery, whether this leaving is for the purpose of committing suicide or reaching freedom, it does not matter. Those women remaining behind symbolize for me the idea of sacrifice. The film questions women’s nature as opposed to men’s, and shows how often women surprise us with their strength of purpose, particularly in moments of crisis.

AD I’ll tell you, that’s been my experience with women. (laughter) I wanted to ask one thing about the titles. You’ve employed an extremely romantic vocabulary: turbulent, rapture, fervor—all psychological terms referring to states of extreme excitement. I thought fervor was a bit ironic. It was the behavior of the audience—that was the fervor, that he, the speaker, had aroused. But rapture, I wasn’t certain of; rapture is usually somewhat erotic in connotation.

SN Oh really?

AD At least in English. “What rapture, divine . . . .” And turbulent is a state of perturbation, disturb and so forth, agitation of a certain sort.

SN The titles are the most difficult part. A mistaken title could lead the project the wrong way, trivialize or reduce the meaning. What I look for in a title is suggestiveness, references that allow the viewers to draw their own interpretations. I thought Turbulent, for example, was about the woman’s state of mind, she was clearly the one not at rest. In Rapture, I saw the meaning as a state of ecstasy.

AD That’s right, it’s ecstasy. It’s just that American culture is not a particularly mystical one; ecstasy here means something like erotic rapture. There are analogies between mystical and erotic transport, and certainly the Persian poets were aware of that connotation. They tend, characteristically, in my recollection, to speak of religious ecstasy in terms of erotic metaphors.

SN It’s the same with Fervor, because it has its religious connotations but at the same time it could be sexual. Again, I was pointing toward the clash between sexual and carnal desire versus social control.

Shirin Neshat, Rapture, 1999, video still.

ADFervor is the one film in which you’re relying on speech rather than music. Music really does overcome linguistic barriers. But in Fervor the man talks at great length, and one tries to infer what he is saying. And he points to a painting that is prominently displayed behind him.

SN From the beginning, I thought about having subtitles. In fact, I had an excerpt of the speech translated, and created subtitles. However, many English-speaking friends came to see me while I was editing and almost all of them felt that subtitles made the work too literal, too obvious, and distracted from the clarity of the image. I regret that I did not have a translation on the exhibition wall so those people interested could have referred to it.

AD Hmm . . . I’m of two minds on that. I really don’t know what the truth is there.

SN The speech becomes very musical here.

AD Yes, it does.

SN It almost functions like an opera, you don’t really listen to the words, you imagine what has been said through the musical qualities. But I did get some criticism for the lack of subtitles; some people were not satisfied with guessing at what was being said. Let me tell you the meaning of the speech and a little about the speaker, whose character is quite dubious. He comes across as something between a politician, a mullah, and an actor. The event was also designed to resemble a political event, a religious ceremony or a theatrical story. I was inspired by public Friday prayers in Iran, where masses of men and women come together, but sit separately. Usually, a distinguished mullah leads the prayers and delivers a moral speech, each time focusing on a particular topic. So in Fervor this man comes on the stage and offers his moral speech which happens to be the problem of sin, particularly sin that arises from sexual behavior—carnal desire. He uses the story of Joseph (Youssef) and Zuleika from the Koran to exemplify the destiny of those who cannot control their sexuality. In the Koran, Zuleika, the female character, seduces Joseph. The painting in the film’s background illustrates the story. This type of theater is actually a traditional form in Iran, where a speaker stands in front of a painting to tell the story. It usually takes place in coffee houses.

AD So the speaker uses the painting as the basis of a narrative.

SN Exactly.

AD How fascinating.

SN I think Fervor, unlike Rapture and Turbulent, was not as easily understood by Westerners.

AD Enough of that narrative came across. For one thing, you feel that whatever the message was, the man and the woman felt themselves beyond or above it, that they were really interested in their more fundamental view, namely each other.

SN Exactly.

AD I loved that they don’t see one another, but the moment the man begins to look toward her, the woman begins to look toward him. Whoever begins that, maybe it’s simultaneous—that’s what is extremely romantic about it. And then they leave simultaneously, and they see one another. And still, there’s a long road ahead of them—literally.

SN The type of forbidden seduction that one experiences in that part of the world is of course very different from what one experiences here in the West. You’re not supposed to make eye contact with the opposite sex. Every Iranian man and woman understands the dilemma, the problematics, and yet there is the joy of a simple exchange in a gaze. This type of social and religious control tends to heighten desire and the sexual atmosphere. Therefore, when there is a modest exchange it is the most magical, sexual experience.

AD I was reading an article about Afghanistan and the enormous closed garment, the burka, women are obliged to wear. The assumption is that women’s eyes are extremely dangerous. They shouldn’t be seen.

SN And the veil is an incredibly powerful icon in the way it empowers a woman sexually. It’s supposed to be doing the opposite, but as you can tell, through a mere gaze the woman can excite men. These are the issues this project explored. I’m not sure it was understood in the West.

AD I thought it was quite universal. It’s a story that is told over and over again. How do men and women overcome the distances that are imposed between the genders?

SN I approached Fervor as a way to close the chapter on this kind of gender curiosity that I’ve had. Finally, in Fervor, the issues are not about opposites, but about the commonality between the man and woman. The taboo surrounding sexuality concerns both men and women, but of course it is the woman who takes most of the heat.

AD So Zuleika is the seducer?

SN Yes, she is the princess and Joseph is a slave.

AD It’s the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. It’s the same story!

SN Exactly.

AD She’s quite treacherous as it turns out. If he doesn’t do what she wants then she’s going to say that he raped her. Well, the Bible is full of a great deal of human wisdom. In this other film, Soliloquy, which I was able to see . . .

SN So you have seen that one!

AD Yes, Barbara Gladstone let me see it at the gallery. And it did seem like a departure. Are you the actress in that?

SN Yes.

AD I thought so. It’s in color. There is a mythic quality to the black and white, but it was important for what you were trying to do that you did use color. Aesthetically it’s very successful. I felt that this was a conversation of a woman with herself. The two screens work a bit the way they do in Turbulent; she sees herself and whether it’s an image, a dream, or a memory—you can’t quite discover. Although there is what I think of as the more traditional setting: there is a child and some tragedy is implied. Whereas the worst thing that seems to be happening to the woman in the other, Western setting is loneliness. That is to say she’s there and the crowds sweep by, and she goes up the staircase. It reminded me of one of Maya Deren’s earlier surrealist films. I thought it was wonderful by the way, but I felt at the same time that it was tentative.

SN Many people, including critics and curators, have been comparing the last few works I have made, telling me which one they think succeeds or does not work as well. I think what is more important is the developmental process, and looking at how each work visually and conceptually takes the ideas forward. Soliloquy has almost no relation to the trilogy that we’ve been speaking about, but it’s a topic that I had wanted to make a film about for a long time; and perhaps the most personal work I’ve ever made. It’s about imagining the emotional state of a woman standing at the threshold of two opposite worlds. She is constantly negotiating between two cultures that are not just different from one another but in complete conflict. So once again the idea of opposites applies but in a different way. The location in the East [Turkey], where it was shot, is the place of her origin. It is ancient, traditional and communal but also a controlling society, at times suffocating, as there is no personal—individual—space. The location in the West [The United States] is in a modern, free, extremely individualistic society where we sense a great personal isolation and loneliness. By the end we find that the woman never quite feels at peace in either space.

AD Do you feel at the end that both states of the woman, or stages, are rushing to meet one another? How could you show that they do get together? Of course, it would be impossible, but . . .

SN That is the ambiguity that I wanted to maintain; it’s not really clear where she was running to or from. Once you leave your place of birth, there’s never a complete sense of center: you’re always in the state of in between and nowhere completely feels like home.

AD I understand you shot Soliloquy in Turkey, but do you have any plans to work in Iran?

SN It has been a dream for me to finally work in my own country. Slowly, I am advancing in that direction although the country is still in a state of flux so one never really knows if it is completely safe to work there or not. But recently I did have a major breakthrough. I was contacted by the minister of culture, the director of the visual arts who also happens to be the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran! He officially invited me to come to Iran to work, exhibit, and meet with local artists. According to this gentleman, there should not be any problems but I have been told to be cautious. However, if things don’t quite work in Iran, I will go back to other Islamic countries, Morocco and Turkey, as I have been. In all my work, I am dealing with issues that address historical, cultural, sociopolitical ideas; but in the end, I want my work to transcend that and function on the most primal and emotional level. I think the music intensifies the emotional quality. Music becomes the soul, the personal, the intuitive and neutralizes the sociopolitical aspects of the work. This combination of image and music is meant to create an experience that moves the audience. It is an expectation that I have as an artist and I want that intensity from any work of art; I want to be deeply affected, almost like asking to have a religious experience. Beauty is important in relation to my work. It is a concept that is most universal, it goes beyond our cultural differences.

AD I believe that. There’s been a kind of cynicism in regard to beauty, that it’s entirely relative. At any rate, I’m thinking myself about it a great deal, philosophically. I’m trying to write a book on that.

SN It is particularly important in relation to my subject since in Islam, beauty is critical, as it directly ties to ideas of spirituality and love of God.

Shirin Neshat: An Interview

All images this article, unless otherwise noted, stills from Shirin Neshat’s film Women Without Men. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York.

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Over the last 12 years, Iranian-born Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) has produced a series of lyrical video installations that touch on such issues as gender politics, cultural self-definition and the authority of religion. Drawing on the artist’s experiences as a Middle Eastern émigré as well as more universal themes of identity, desire and social isolation, these works have garnered many honors, including, in 1999, a Venice Biennale International Golden Lion prize. Since 2003, Neshat has been engaged in an ambitious two-part video/film project based on (and titled after) the 1989 novel Women Without Men by the Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur.

The project’s five individual videos—Mahdokht (2004), Zarin (2005), Munis (2008),Faezeh (2008) and Farokh Legha (2008)—each of which centers on one of the female characters in the novel, have recently been brought together into a single multiroom installation. First shown in 2008 at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark, the composite work traveled to Faurschou Beijing Gallery in China and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens. It will go on view at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm this fall, with other venues pending. In addition, four of the videos (all except Farokh Legha) were screened at last year’s “Prospect.1 New Orleans” biennial.

While making the videos (largely sponsored by Gladstone Gallery, New York, and Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris), Neshat also worked on a soon-to-be-released feature film. The movie, which spins off from both the novel and the videos, features a dreamlike narrative that interweaves the women’s personal stories with the political upheavals of 1953 Tehran, the setting for Parsipur’s book. (Alarmed by the nationalization of Iran’s oil fields, British and American operatives that year abetted a coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, reinstating the Shah.) To create the videos and the film, Neshat worked closely with her longtime collaborator, Shoja Azari, who coauthored the final script. The film version, shot in Casablanca in the Farsi language, primarily uses Iranian actors who live in Europe. It also includes a voiceover written by poet and art critic Steven Henry Madoff.

Over a series of weeks, I spoke with Neshat about the genesis of the “Women Without Men” project. We discussed its meaning to her, the challenge of translating Parsipur’s novel into moving images, the tricky task of balancing its poetic and political elements, and the differing demands of video and film.

ELEANOR HEARTNEY: How did this project come about?

SHIRIN NESHAT: At the time I was in Documenta in 2002, having made several video installations, I was beginning to feel very consumed by being in one big international show after another, making one work after another. I felt I needed time off to plan a project that would take a long time to realize. Then I got a call from the Sundance Institute, asking if I would consider developing a feature film project for their writers’ lab. At first, I thought I couldn’t, so I said no. Then, after Documenta, I thought why not?

EH: What did you discover about the difference between the art and film worlds?

SN: In the art world you are very free, but you end up making something that few people see. In the film world anybody can view your film for the small price of a ticket, but you are not as free. There is also a big difference between film producers and art dealers. Producers are extremely involved. Everything has to go through them, while an art dealer basically leaves you alone and remains uninvolved in the production.

What I wanted from the beginning was to create a feature film for theaters, in parallel with a group of related video installations for gallery and museum settings. I found out that in order to get funding for a feature film you have to have a quality script — and this was a new experience for me, since I had just storyboarded my past videos. My producers insisted that I work with the German script consultant Franz Rodenkirchen, so I started to travel back and forth to Berlin, eventually becoming a resident in 2003. Franz would read the script and offer his criticisms; I would revise and return for more discussions. This took a few years, and in the process I think we did over a hundred and fifty different versions, ending with a script that was co-written by myself and Shoja Azari.

EH: The film and the installations tell the story in radically different ways.

SN: Yes, they are very different kinds of constructions. The logic behind the editing of the video installations was to create a group of five nonlinear narratives, giving a glimpse into the nature of each of the five characters, as opposed to telling their entire stories. The idea was that the viewer would walk from room to room and, at the end, be able to put the story together. So in reality the viewer becomes the editor.

The logic for the movie version was to make a straight narrative, a more or less conventional film, while relying on my visual esthetics. The main challenge was how to fuse my artistic vocabulary with cinematic language. I realized that I had underestimated the difficulties of pacing, story development, dialogue and many other related issues. In a film, you must never lose the thread of the story, and at times beautiful imagery has to be discarded as too distracting. The issues of comprehension and clarity are very important, whereas in art practice, enigma and abstraction are encouraged.

In the end, I learned that the fundamental difference between cinema and art is the question of character development. In all my past work, such as the videos Rapture [1999] and Passage [2001], I had treated people sculpturally, devoid of any character or identity. They were simply iconic figures. But with this film, I had to learn how to build characters, how to enter their inner worlds, their mindsets. This was an entirely new experience for me. I began to appreciate directors like Bergman, who could keep you pinned in your seat, sometimes spending two hours merely with two characters in one room.

EH: Let’s talk about the story you chose to tell. Both the videos and the film are based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel Women Without Men. What drew you to this book?

SN: This is a very well-known novel that has been banned for many years in Iran. Parsipur herself spent five years in prison. I have always had an obsession with certain Iranian women writers, not just for their fantastic talent but also for how their lives and artistic work mirror each another.

Women Without Men is a quite beautiful but strange novel. I couldn’t have picked a more difficult book. It is written in a magic-realist style, which I was told later is perhaps the most challenging type of literature to convert into cinema. Even before I started, my advisors told me to be careful.

My attraction to the book probably stems from the fact that my own work comes out of a similar conjunction of influences. It is deeply personal and highly emotional yet equally political. Like Parsipur’s novel, everything that I have ever made concerns the intersection of contrary elements: personal/social, global/local, spiritual/ violent, masculine/feminine. My work is all about opposites and parallels. Parsipur’s tale follows the coup d’état that took place in Tehran in the summer of 1953, when Iranians struggled for political freedom against imperialism, while also tracing five women as they go on their own quests for personal freedom.

EH: How would you sum up the theme of this book?

SN: The story is a deeply philosophical one. It tells of five women who all run away from their troubled pasts and find that their lives mysteriously converge in an orchard in the countryside. This orchard becomes a refuge, a place of exile, where they can disconnect themselves from the external world. These women have something in common—the courage to take their destinies into their own hands. Some of the characters are quite realistically portrayed, such as Farokh Legha, a women in her fifties who still wants to start life over again, and Faezeh, who wants to have a normal family—a plan interrupted when she is raped. Other characters are more surrealistically drawn, like Munis, who commits suicide and finds freedom through death, and Zarin, a prostitute who begins to see her customers as literally faceless.

The film follows in parallel manner each woman’s journey out of Tehran and into the orchard. Once in the orchard, the women feel fulfilled and safe. Together they create a utopian community, until one of them gets bored and chooses to open the orchard to others. Parsipur is obviously alluding to the Garden of Eden.

EH: In the film, Munis is the pivotal character. She dies at the beginning but is resurrected, and it is her voiceover that guides us through the story.

SN: In the novel, Munis enters the orchard like the other women, and Parispur treats her as a woman who is simply curious about the world but not particularly political. In my film, I changed her story. She becomes a political activist, and she enters the orchard as a ghost, not as a human. In fact, it is through her experiences that we witness the political development in the country. Meanwhile, as the narrator of the film, she also serves as a spiritual guide.

EH: The book and videos have a fifth female character, Mahdokht, who plants herself as a tree in the garden. Why did you leave her out of the film?

SN: The extremely magical nature of her character was difficult to balance in the film. Originally, in the first few drafts of the script, she was included, but she eventually got eliminated. Mahdokht is a woman who plants herself as a tree since she is terrified of sexual intercourse but obsessed with fertility. She dreams of producing fruits and seeds that can be disseminated around the globe. So you can imagine how far out her story was.

EH: Meanwhile, you give a bigger role to the gardener, who appears both in the brothel scene as one of Zarin’s customers and as a nurturing figure in the garden.

SN: The gardener is treated as a very mysterious, rather angelic figure throughout the film. His identity is never quite revealed. He recruits the women for the orchard. And as you mentioned, he appears as a faceless monster in the brothel, which causes Zarin to escape the place; then, in the orchard, he seems very compassionate.

EH: The ending of the film also differs radically from the book’s.

SN: I must say that there are numerous things that I love about the novel, such as its philosophical and political nature, plus its broad range of female characters, from Westernized to devoutly religious and traditional to extremely poor. But I don’t really like how the story plays out once the women arrive at the orchard, nor how it ends. I feel that the women become victims, and I never wanted to portray my characters as victims. I wanted to make a film that shows women who obviously are oppressed and against the wall—due to sexual, religious or social pressure—but who all undergo a positive transformation.

EH: Which of these characters do you find yourself identifying with?

SN: Just as Parsipur constructed the characters according to her own personality, I’ve done the same. Munis and I share a passion for political activism, a belief in social justice. With Faezeh, I share the desire for a normal, traditional life. With Farokh Legha, the idea of aging but still wanting to start over again. With Zarin, the character that I perhaps feel closest to, it is the problem of the female body and feelings of shame. As a Muslim woman, I have grown up with a complex about my body, always feeling inadequate.

EH: Your film also has much more emphasis on the political aspects of the story. You highlight the 1953 coup.

SN: In the novel, the political material is only in the background, but I expanded it and brought it forward. Selfishly, I found it very timely to revisit history and remind Westerners that the American and British governments were directly responsible for overthrowing a democratic system in Iran. The CIA organized the coup in 1953, which in turn paved the road for the Islamic Revolution in 1979. As far as I know, this is the only film made so far that tries to depict this monumental political moment.

EH: The film deals with the period before you were born. How did you reach back to that?

SN: The Iran I grew up in was not so different from the one described in the novel. We were quite Westernized. The society was perhaps not as democratic as in 1953, because the Shah had created SAVAK, the secret police, but the country was far freer than it is today. In my film, you’ll see how, before the coup, the Communists and the Muslims, like the pro-Shah, the pro-Mossadegh and the pro-West groups, all coexisted. To this day, most Iranians believe that Mossadegh’s overthrow robbed them of the possibility of democracy for decades, and caused the relationship between Iran and the United States to break down. In the course of my research, I discovered how little I knew about this period and how wonderfully sophisticated and fascinating Iranian culture was at the time.

EH: On the other hand, although the film is more political than the book, you maintain a strong degree of magic realism. It can be argued that Parsipur, living in Iran, had to deal rather obliquely with her concerns about women’s roles and the place of religion. You, however, could have made a more overtly political film. Why did you retain so many fantastical elements?

SN: In cultures where citizens struggle with heavy social control, magic realism is a natural tendency. For Iranians, who have endured one dictatorship after another, poetic-metaphoric language is a way to express all that is not allowed in reality. Of course, these days, the government has a good grasp of subversive art and literature. So even though it takes place in 1953, Parsipur’s novel is considered highly problematic by the current Islamic government, which is sensitive to the book’s religious and sexual overtones. Personally, magic realism seems to suit me well, because I feel most comfortable with surrealism—not only as a strategy to avoid the obvious but as a means to make art that transcends the specificities of time and place.

EH: Do you anticipate any trouble with Women Without Men?

SN: I already know that the film won’t be screened in most of the Islamic world, primarily because of a few scenes. For example, at one moment we see Faezeh praying, then soon after, in another shot, she becomes partially nude as she unbuttons her shirt. But this was the only way I could represent a woman coming to terms with her body after a rape. Equally problematic might be showing Zarin nude in the bathhouse. Without a doubt, there will be some angry responses from Muslims troubled by the mixing of sexual and religious themes. I also expect some controversy over the political nature of the story. There are many disputes among Iranians and Westerners regarding the coup. The course of events has been interpreted differently by different camps, so the historical truth still remains a subject of debate.

EH: How has the film evolved from your earliest conception?

SN: Originally, the film opened in a very realistic manner with a fight between Munis and her brother. For the first twenty minutes, the audience would have thought they were watching a conventional narrative. Then, half an hour into the film, we introduced the surrealistic nature of the story. But later I decided that we must establish the surrealism from the beginning, so the audience won’t build an expectation for a standard film. In its current version, the film begins with Munis’s flight from the roof, which could be interpreted as a suicide but also as a leap toward freedom, since the shot is exaggerated. She is also now the narrator, who is telling us a story while flying and observing the world below.

In making the film more artistic and surrealistic, I had to be sure that it does not go in the direction of an extended video installation. Within this somewhat abstract framework, we had to develop a clear logic that hopefully will give the audience strong clues to both the story and the style of the film. By nature, this film is like a puzzle, as we must simultaneously follow four main characters, each on a journey, as well as a country in turmoil. For me, filming Women Without Men has been all about finding the right balance.

Shirin Neshat’s film Women Without Men will be screened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [June 15], the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego [June 18], and the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin [Sept. 25]. Her video exhibition of the same title appears at the Kulturhuset, Stockholm, [Oct. 24, 2009-Jan. 10, 2010]. The artist will also have shows at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris [Sept. 16-Nov. 21], Gladstone Gallery, Brussels [September dates pending], and Marco Noire Contemporary Art, Turin [Sept 24-Nov. 30].

Women of Allah: An Interview With Exiled Artist Shirin Neshat

The figures in Women of Allah, Shirin Neshat’s collection of early photographs, are at once modest, seductive and actively aggressive. Veiled Iranian women have their exposed flesh overlaid with the elaborate script of Farsi feminist poetry, their eyes aligned inches from the barrel of a gun, or their hands stained red with the blood of martyrdom. Like the decades’ worth of controversial and challenging visual art that followed them, these four monochrome portraits unpick the paradoxes of female Islamic identity and the flaws in Western perceptions of it.

Neshat’s photography and films navigate the intersection between art and politics, East and West, masculine and feminine. Named “Artist of the Decade” by G. Roger Denson for The Huffington Post in 2010, she has received international acclaim, but she is very clear about the politics of her artistic motivation. Recently she explained that, as an Iranian, “an artist like myself finds herself in the position of being the voice, the speaker of my people…art is our weapon, culture is a form of resistance.”

Born in 1957, Neshat grew up in Iran before leaving to study in Los Angeles prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution. She has described her subsequent return, nearly twelve years later, to her homeland under the theocratic regime as “one of the most shocking experiences that I have ever had.”

“I think that a lot of us take for granted the importance of democracy [in the West.] I remember when I was detained in the airport in Iran and I was just terrified because I was aware that I had no way of defending myself.” It is the daily reality of living without democracy that explains why “every Iranian artist, in one form or another is political. Politics have defined our lives.”

In her 1998 video installation Turbulent, two parallel screens are set up in dynamic opposition: on one we see a tensely static audience of men, symbolically partitioned off from the other screen where a lone woman sings in an empty auditorium. Her haunting voice builds our frustration to almost unbearable heights, made more unbearable if the watcher remembers that in Iran today it is illegal for women to sing in public. The figures on the screen pulse before us and we sense their ache to break free from sexual repression. Yet her passionate political criticism is profoundly defined by her Iranian identity. She doesn’t visualise the smashing of the partition in Turbulent; she doesn’t shed the modest veils of her sitters for Women of Allah.

“In Iran,” she tells me, “you don’t even know a way of expressing yourself without self-censoring and working within the parameter of the absence of freedom of expression. We have learnt to be very poetic, and symbolic, and metaphoric in terms of forming an expression. My aesthetic is automatically very safe, in a way, as it gets diluted in poetic language so that the government may not be able to detect the sharp knife.”

Yet Neshat argues that this “has actually empowered artists because they have to be so inventive and savvy to find ways to threaten the government.” She cites the example of a recent Iranian production of Hamlet which veiled its implied criticism of the government so subtly that “whilst every Iranian in the audience understood the politically subversive message, the Head of Censorship for the government didn’t even understand why he’d been sent to look at it.”

If her art is a weapon, however, it is targeted as much at the prejudice she encounters in exile as at the oppression she confronts at home. “I am blown away by the West’s misunderstanding of Islamic values and culture. The Western notion of the superiority of their societies and their need to import their ideas into Eastern societies that they consider more or less barbaric is very arrogant and misperceived.”

In particular, her work addresses the failing of western feminism to appreciate the nuances of women’s lives under Sharia law in Iran. The group of women who progress through expanses of dust-blown desert to the ocean in her video instillation Rapture are not merely oppressed and isolated: they are vigorously resilient. Together, they launch a boat into the crashing waves, their faces emphatically individualised beneath their dark, ubiquitous veils. Neshat’s art invokes the reality that today “there are more Iranian women educated in university than men. Women have become the biggest threat to the government.”

Her first feature film, Women Without Men, won her a Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. It was a magical realist exploration of the 1953 CIA-backed coup d’état in Iran which imagined four women’s search for meaning beyond male governance. The women evoke a diverse range of female experience in Iran, from the restless housewife to the prostitute, but together they escape the violent streets and gather in an orchard of mesmerising lushness and mystery. She poignantly describes their solace in each other’s companionship, in their own female, Islamic “homosociety”, as theorist Eve Kosofky Sedswick has termed it. As stereotypes of submissive Islamic women are subverted, she demonstrates how, as she once explained to the journalist Collier Schorr, these women’s “protests are manifested in subtle yet powerful ways” – ways akin, perhaps, to her own artistic statements.

Yet her art aims, through its subtlety, to incite more vigorous, explicit protest. In the year that Women Without Men was released, Iran’s Green Movement flooded the streets of Tehran with the same cry for democracy that the film highlights in the protests of 1953. Her strong female protagonists were being mirrored by modern-day women rising to the forefront of the demonstrations.

It was the role of women in the Green Movement, and later in the Arab Spring, which Neshat found most inspirational. The female protesters were “women who were educated, forward thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist. Iranian women have found a new voice and their voice is giving me my voice.”

“One thing that I have learnt from the Arab Spring and the Green Movement – and I actually took part in one of the big demonstrations in Egypt – was that the people’s power is quite amazing. For the first time I became a strong believer that change could only come if everyone, absolutely everyone gets out on the streets. Nothing is more frightening to the authorities than sheer numbers of people. They cannot kill enough, they cannot arrest enough, they cannot censor enough, there’s just nothing they can do. The sense of hope becomes very contagious – it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, or educated or not, or young or old…In the Green Movement there were people who never in their lifetime thought that they would get out on the street, and they were talking about it.”

Neshat remains devoted to her political mission as an artist; she has exhibited ten times so far this year, to audiences worldwide, from Seoul to Budapest. Despite the thousands of miles which have separated her from Iran for decades; despite the fierce censorship of the Islamic regime who brand her work “Anti-revolutionary”; despite the frustrating disconnect between East and West . Or perhaps it is because of all these things; and because she still has hope in the global fight for democracy.

“People think that the Arab Spring and the Green Movement have finished because of the lack of protest, but opposition doesn’t happen only in the form of physical demonstrations, a lot can be done off the streets… And now when we ask people if there’s anything going on underground, they say, “Of course there is, it’s all really hidden but the genie is out of the box.”

In exile, she continues to keep the genie alive.

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Since 1928

Interview to Shirin Neshat

The Iranian artist, winner of the Silver Lion at the last Venice Festival, talks about herself to Gabi Scardi: from her nomadic approach to media, to the unresolved relationship with her home.

The artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat has explored identity through her art for more than 30 years. Although based in New York since the age of 17, her main focus has always been her native Iran, especially the plight of Iranian women. She is one of those artists who are driven by the need to see and portray not only the environment from which they come but also that in which they now find themselves. They use the language of art to create a dialogue between the present and the myths of their country of origin, on the one hand, and the culture of the country they have moved to, on the other. Their ubiquitous cultural position instils a need to oppose the automatism of accepted ideas that have never truly been thought through, indeed not thought about at all, and dispense with all kinds of a priori definitions to allow the co-existence of different Weltanschauungen. Long drawn to the film world, Shirin Neshat’s first feature film Women without Men won the Silver Lion at the last Venice Film Festival. With an enigmatic language and the punctilious and perfect style that distinguishes all her work, the artist narrates a number of individual stories that share the reference of a magnificent orchid garden: an inner sanctum, a secluded place in which to escape a routine or brutal routine. The video has just been presented on a tour around the major Italian cities of Milan, Rome, Bologna and Florence. The tour also offered the opportunity to demand that Italy exert pressure on the Iranian government to release the film director Panahi, recently arrested with his family. “Our role as Iranian artists abroad is to focus people’s attention on what is happening in our country” says Neshat.

When and why did you decide to shift from video to full-length films? Do you think you will continue with films? What does this change mean for someone like you, used to working in the visual art field?
As an artist, I have always had a rather nomadic approach to mediums, as you know I started with photography, then video and now I’m making films. I have always loved the idea of starting all over again, learning a new medium is a way of challenging myself. So this development from still images to moving pictures came naturally to me, and in a way it reflects my personality, which tends to have a strong distaste for repetition and is quite fearless about crossing boundaries. But I also think the more I made videos, the more I grew to like the cinema and the notion of storytelling. I see filmmaking as the most complete form of art – it can incorporate photography, painting, choreography, music, performance, narrative and much more. In terms of the practice of art versus filmmaking, making art is a very solitary experience but films are a more communal process that requires artists to come out of their studios and into the world, to work with a team and to discover new cultures and people they would not otherwise have met. There is also a part of me that is greatly attracted to the film audience, in the sense that I find the cinema generally more democratic and closer to the general public. I have grown somewhat frustrated by the notion of artists making precious commodities that are only to be seen in gallery and museum settings, to be collected by a few individuals and museums and, most importantly, that can mostly be appreciated by a well educated and exclusive art-world audience with a good grasp of the history of art. In that respect, the film culture seems far more grass rooted in that it is accessible to everyone without the need for any previous education on the history of films. I have every intention of continuing in both fields and I do not find it necessary to abandon one form for the other. So at the moment I am working on a series of photographs as well as an idea for my next feature film.

What will your next film be?
It is The Palace of Dreams from the novel by Ismail Kadare.

Videos usually imply active spatial practice for the audience. Your videos, in particular, with their juxtaposed screens and multiple projections were very physical experiences. Does the manner of fruition change in the passage from video to cinema? If yes, how?
You are absolutely right, video installations, particularly as I conceived them in the past, became very spatial and sculptural so the audience had a physical experience with the videos as it became immersed in the image. With the feature film, although it remains very visual, I experiment with a narrative style and, most importantly, I learn to work with “characters” in a way I never explored in my past videos. Generally speaking, if I may distinguish between the languages of art and film, I would say art is more about creating “concepts” and films are about “telling stories”. As artists, we cannot presume to simply import our video concepts into films without understanding and respecting the rules of the cinematic language. To make a film that lasts for 90 minutes you need a clear narrative development to captivate the audience in their seats; in galleries and museums, visitors can enter and exit the rooms as they wish.

You seem closely linked to your Iranian origins. Your artworks are always closely connected to the concrete situation in Iran but you have lived in USA for a long time now and you seem to be a citizen of the world. You live in a sort of ubiquitous cultural position. I imagine that this diasporic cultural identity influences your vision…
Indeed, as I feel emotionally, psychologically, culturally and politically divided between East and West, my art also reflects that dichotomy. My obsession with my country, Iran, is due to the personal fact that I have an unresolved relationship with my home. I have lived far from my family and my country without choice and I have felt abandoned in the West without any access to my family ever since I was seventeen years old. Therefore, I harbour some resentment and anger towards the political systems and governments that have determined the course of my life. In a way, my art has become a tool, a way to face up to my personal dilemma yet, as a result of this, I have found myself in a broader dialogue on the social, political and cultural realities of my country and the world at large.

With the current situation in Iran, do you think your artwork could be shown to the public nowadays? Why?
I think absolutely not as long as this government is in place; there is no possibility of the work of an artist such as myself being exhibited.

What kind of engagement should we expect from an artist, in your opinion?
As far as Iranian artists go, oppressive as the current cultural climate in Iran is, they play a great role in their country. Artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians and all people with imagination tend to be the voice of the Iranian people, painstakingly reporting life under the current regime to both Iranians (inside and outside) and to Westerners. Subversive art and artists have therefore become a great threat to the Islamic regime, as the government recognizes their ability to provoke the public and it systematically imposes censorship, harassment and very often arrests.

You have been in Italy for a few weeks and you may have heard about strange things going on here in relation to women such as paparazzi, blackmail in the political milieu and vallettopoli; I sometimes sadly ask myself whether this is a result of regression or of progress (at least women are speaking clearly!). What do you think about that? Do you have any impressions or ideas on the Italian situation?
I must confess I am not very familiar with the plight of Italian women but I have heard how some women have themselves subscribed to the idea of women remaining sexual objects, almost eradicating everything that the Feminist movement achieved for us and this is, indeed, a very troubling regression.

Gabi Scardi’s interview with Shirin Neshat took place on 12 March 2010 at the presentation and preview of the film at the Odeon cinema in Florence. The event, coordinated by Silvia Lucchesi, was organised by Lo schermo dell’arte and FST – Mediateca Toscana Film Commission.